US woman turns up alive after her own funeral

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A woman has turned up alive nearly two weeks after her family held a funeral and burial for her.

Services for 50-year-old Sharolyn Jackson were held Aug. 3 in New Jersey.

Jackson’s mother, Carrie Minney, says the woman in the casket looked just like her daughter, except for the nose. She says the family assumed something had happened to the nose during the embalming process.

“There was really a strong resemblance, a really strong resemblance,” Minney, 69, said Friday in a phone interview from her home in Trenton, New Jersey. “She looks so much like Sharol they could be sisters.”

After Jackson showed up at Pennsylvania Hospital last week, police confirmed her identity through fingerprints. Her son went to the hospital and immediately recognized her.

“He said, ‘That’s my mom. We made a terrible mistake,’” Garrow said.

Jackson was reported missing around the time that paramedics took a woman who’d been found lying in a Philadelphia street to a hospital, where she died July 20. One of Jackson’s sons and a social worker at Horizon House, where her mother said she had been receiving treatment for drug and mental health problems, viewed pictures of the dead woman’s body and made the identification.

The medical examiner determined the woman died of heat stroke, signed a death certificate and released the body to the family, Philadelphia Department of Health spokesman James Garrow said.

“If someone comes in and they’re a family member and say, ‘That’s my mom,’ that’s generally good enough,” Garrow said.